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    courtMelissa Valentine
    4/11/16 12:12pm

    To paraphrase the Holocaust “survivor” Eli Weisel, author of the iconic memoir “Night,” in his response to a woman who expressed her guilt at feeling sad and depressed over trivial things, as her suffering could never match Weisel’s, he essentially told her this...”we all have our own pain, which fills us to the brim. I do not give you permission to take on my pain. Yours is as real and legitimate as mine. Never feel guilt for it.”. By the way Melissa this is easily among the smartest, well crafted, devastating things you have ever written. Well done.

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      freaks go all the waycourt
      4/11/16 12:13pm

      Jia?

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      courtfreaks go all the way
      4/11/16 12:15pm

      Changed

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    freaks go all the wayMelissa Valentine
    4/11/16 12:17pm

    For many years I felt I wore the costume of a together person. I was hiding, very close to the surface, an extremely traumatized person. Everyone seemed happier than me and existed in a state of ease. I felt I was lurking in their world—white, middle class, educated, a sense of ease about it all. And I felt my mask always threatened to drip off and reveal the wounded monster that had to negotiate her worthiness daily.

    This hit me like a sack of bricks.

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      courtfreaks go all the way
      4/11/16 12:20pm

      Amazing passage.

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      hellohowareyouimfinehowareyoufreaks go all the way
      4/11/16 12:55pm

      As far as we know, none of us gets to choose who we get to be. I wish we would start dropping the needless assertion of “blah-blah, white, blah-blah” from every description of ostracization or marginalizing. I realize there is a different experience in being one in a crowd, but not one of us gets to choose that, and I don’t feel it’s appropriate to lump me in with other middle class white people who coast through life, oblivious to loss, despite losing my own brother and feeling the same feelings she expresses in this post. I’m disallowed to commiserate because I’m white.

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    deerlady83Melissa Valentine
    4/11/16 12:59pm

    Sometimes, I’ve felt guilty for my family surviving and doing well. There were so many American Indian families that weren’t as lucky as mine. We’ve had our troubles but we still been able to manage. A lot of American Indians are still struggling. I’m not. I was able to get a good education and a good job. I felt a little guilty that I was able to escape and avoid a lot of things other people didn’t. I found out from my mother two kids I went to school with never made it to adulthood. Some of those that did get the chance to grow up ended up in prison or didn’t graduate.

    I think that might be why I fight so hard for my students. I want to give them chances and options. I want to give them the tools they need to help them survive.

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      sybanndeerlady83
      4/11/16 2:00pm

      Love to you. XO

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      m-o-o-nthatspellsmoondeerlady83
      4/11/16 5:37pm

      I hear this so much. I think it’s something a lot of minorities who have been able to move beyond where they came from or the communities in which we grew up. I even have felt this way within my own family since not all my siblings went to college. Not that it is a measure of one's self worth by any means - but it is hard to not feel guilt or maybe even shame when you know people around you are struggling or at the very least not doing as well. I'm starting law school this fall, and am struggling to find balance between being proud of myself and not feeling like some academia blowhard who thinks they're better just because of their education.

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    Major Lazer Power BlazerMelissa Valentine
    4/11/16 12:22pm

    this is a great article.

    the only way i was able to move on from my trauma was through EMDR therapy. the reprocessing of my trauma has allowed me to shift out of victim/survivor mode (and out of my PTSD) and into a person that something bad happened to me but thats as far as it really gets in my brain

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      kittiesandtittiesohmyMajor Lazer Power Blazer
      4/11/16 12:35pm

      Please tell me more about EDMR. I have heard so much about it but I still don’t understand it and I feel so much guilt about just not getting it when people talk about how the rapid eye movement helps them. Like, I know that it’s not hogwash and stuff and really want to be open minded.

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      RiotPunkGothGrrrlMajor Lazer Power Blazer
      4/11/16 12:49pm

      I’m being treated with EMDR for PTSD now, too, and it’s been really helpful. I didn’t know anything about it when my therapist started it, and I thought it sounded silly. More fool me. At least for me, it’s taking some of the immediacy out of that emotional loop, giving me some distance from it.

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    steve62Melissa Valentine
    4/11/16 12:32pm

    Wierdest thing when my brother shows up in my dreams is I am so much older than he was when he died, but he’s still my older brother.

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      kittiesandtittiesohmysteve62
      4/11/16 12:37pm

      Goosebumps to this. Thank you for sharing.

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      CatApostrophesteve62
      4/11/16 4:07pm

      Semi-related, but my dad died when I was in my late teens and I’ve dreamt about him a fair amount (usually it’s me getting to say goodbye ‘cause I didn’t get to in real life) but he’s always exaggerated or distorted in some way. He’s taller, has different glasses, more hair, darker hair. It’s him, but it’s not. Several months ago, I was prescribed Sonata for insomnia and one of the things about Rx sleeping pills is that some people get crazy vivid dreams. The first night I took it, I dreamt of my dad and it was exactly him. He’s been dead for almost 9 years and, in my dream, he was as lifelike as he was before I lost him. Frankly, it was extremely cool and I was grateful for the experience. Of course, nobody shared my enthusiasm and I got a bunch of pitying looks when I told people about the dream, but it didn’t really bug me ‘cause, as far as I was concerned, I got to see my dad again and nothing really beats that. I still have several of the pills left and I basically only use them when I wanna have awesome dreams. They don’t really help me sleep anyway, Benadryl is actually more effective.

      Also, *hugs* about your brother.

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    spoonfulla-sugarMelissa Valentine
    4/11/16 12:26pm

    When I was 15 one of my best friends was killed. I was supposed to be there, but by fluke went to a different gathering that night. Your story brought back so many of those feelings from those first years, and made me wonder how much I still hang on to that is now just hardcoded “surviving”. And then I thought of my own 15 year old daughter, dealing with her dad’s sudden (though now clearly inevitable) departure from our daily lives, visiting a few moments every few weeks. She’s been all over the map, and now I fully grasp, having been reminded, this is her grieving. When she chirps about a nice visit while I’ve spent the day handling all the grudge I don’t have time to during the work week, I now remember that I have to not allow that strike so painfully deep. Those are her text messages from the other side to feel a connection that was severed so harshly and abruptly. Thank you for writing and sharing this so I can rectify some things.

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      Tequila MockingbirdMelissa Valentine
      4/11/16 1:23pm

      Sometimes I’m stunned at the pain people walk around with every day and still manage to function.

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        Bea Arthur au naturelMelissa Valentine
        4/11/16 1:29pm

        Hey commentariat - please, for the love of everything good, please resist the temptation to argue with the stray hateful assholes trying to shit up this post, okay? I’m sure their stupid attempts at cruelty come from some bottomless hole in their own selves that they can’t manage to fill - but all the same, please, keep them in the grays where they belong. Please.

        Melissa? Thank you for writing this. The trauma I have carried with me in life is very, very different, and I can’t ever fully know the pain that you live with. But trying desperately to keep up the charade of normalcy when you can’t shake the feeling that you will always be broken inside, that no matter what you manage to pull off you will never quite be able to really function and feel the way others do unencumbered by guilt and sadness and self-loathing and loss - the constant walking on a knife’s edge between accepting who you are, and trying to be who you want to be... I know that pain. I know it so, so well. I’m so sorry you do too.

        I wish I knew how to fix it. I wish I had advice for you or for myself or for anyone, and I don’t. All I can do is thank you for making me feel less alone, and a tiny bit less stuck in the prison of my broken self.

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          botticelliloveBea Arthur au naturel
          4/11/16 2:07pm

          This. The flag and dismiss buttons are your friends, everyone.

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        adultosaur married anna on the astral planeMelissa Valentine
        4/11/16 12:47pm

        thank you, melissa.

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          MsMMelissa Valentine
          4/11/16 1:17pm

          Though I have not lost my loved ones to violence, I lost my father and my sister to heart attacks, at young ages. This articles speaks to me on so many levels. I have incredibly real dreams about both of them all the time. I wake up crying every month or some from them. I remember about a year after my father died (in 1999), I had such an real dream about him. He just kept apologizing for leaving us (dying) and I called my sister as soon as I woke up, hysterically crying. I took me a good 5 years to even talk about that dream without bursting into tears.

          My sister died at 34, in 2007. One of her ex boyfriends, my favorite, Pat, still keeps in touch with me. he’s married now, has kids, and is doing really well. But i get periodic emails from him, telling me about dreams he had about her. I’m on the west coast (Oakland!) and he’s back east, so I almost always get these emails while i’m at work. I’m all to familiar with crying at my desk, and hoping no one notices or asks why. I’m tried of people looking at me like i’m broken when they hear about my sister and my dad. And my desk is out in the open, I have no door to hide behind, so someone always notices, and asks if I’m ok. My mom will send flowers on the anniversaries of their deaths. Then co-workers will ask why I got flowers, always awkward, never the answers they are expecting. lately I’ve been having dreams where my sister will be alive, but my Mom is dead, or one where my dad and my boyfriend died in the same week. I woke up bawling, and freaked my boyfriend out, only to realize it was my dad’s birthday. My mind is a very strange place.

          But i like to think this is how they stay in contact with me, through my dreams, This is how they never really leave me. And, I’m so glad that I remember all my dreams as well as I do. I miss them both so much, and I too feel incredibly selfish, when I get upset about stupid shit, and then realize..fuck, M...you’re alive, your sister isn’t, her life stolen from her by a faulty heart. How am I older than my older sister, why her, and not me. Why is life so fucking unfair?! I will never stop being fucked up and damaged from losing them so young. My dad’s death happened at a time that managed to drastically change the trajectory of my life. I will never be what I always thought I would be, and I’m happy about that, but it is crazy to think about what would have happened if he would have died at literally any other time than when he did.

          Ok, I’m about to to cry at my desk now. Melissa, I look forward to reading your book. You sound like an amazing, strong women! Hugs!

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            YessirMsM
            4/11/16 4:45pm

            Wow you and I share almost the same exact story....I lost my dad to heart attack in 97' then about 10 years later I lost my brother to heart attack as well. My mom took to drinking after my dad...Can’t really blame her we all had our world thrown upside down. I was living in a place where I didn’t have a whole lot of friends around and so what got me by was just me and my dog. It’s strange as I am really just now coming to terms with how all of that really affected my life. To this day I’m a loner and have trouble with letting anybody in. Much like you, I get angry with myself for being upset with such trivial stuff. That void left behind from losing them is something that will never leave and for me it comes in like waves. Some days the waters are calm, but there will be a storm soon enough. Don’t really know where I am going with this, but just felt like reaching out because your story resonated with me. All I know is folks like us been put through the ringer for no apparent reason other than those are just the cards we were dealt. It’s total bullshit and it ain’t fair. Try not to be to hard on yourself and fucked up you are not...just been knocked down a time or two. Hope I didn’t ramble to much and take care!

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            MsMYessir
            4/11/16 5:00pm

            Hugs for you! My mom never drank before my Dad died, now she drinks wine. I didn’t used to drink much, but after my sister died, I started drinking more. I knew I had to do something different than after my dad died, because I couldn’t fall apart like I did before, and my sister always made fun of me for not drinking a lot, so I actually said “I’m going to make a concerted effort to drink more, L would like that.” It worked. Seriously, I probably would have gone insane without my dog, she was my rock through everything, and then she died 6 months after my sister did, it almost killed me. It’s a shitty hand we were dealt! My boyfriend gets upset because he can’t truly understand what it’s like and he can’t fix it. I try to explain to him that it’s ok, and he is lucky. Everyone will go through it eventually, we just had to way sooner that we should have.

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